Category Archives: IT

March 11, 2021 · 19:10

In your face space

It happens, something is staring me right in the face and I lay it beside me. It happens, it happens to us all. This trip started in 1992 (I believe), at a consumer electronic show in Amsterdam (RAI) we got to see the first Mini Disc, the first thought I had that it would be a great digital system for computers, it was roughly 4% of a Bernoulli disk whilst being able to store 600% of what a Bernoulli could store. The idea was rejected by Sony, too incompatible they claimed, nowadays we know more, it would have been a great option, it would have pushed players like Apple to the limit 5 years ahead of the curve. Yesterday I was confronted with that thought as my DVD was acting up (the disc, not the player). Now consider the new players, the new way to watch TV. All whilst the telecom companies want you to use more and more bandwidth, the more they can harvest, the more dependent you get to become.

What if we take that away? Consider this Compact Flash, one card, not 26 discs, merely one card and it is not even the start, in a time and place where collections are complete book cases and we can replace it in almost all cases with one card per TV series. The fans have a perfect copy per card and there is still the option to upgrade over time, in the age where 4K will define new boundaries, the retail side also needs to adhere, a setting where we can drive innovation, not merely follow it. Battlestar Galactica, Smallville, Babylon 5, Teen Wolf, Games of Thrones, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, Dexter, Midsomer Murders, the Star Wars saga and so on, one card per setting and the technology is already here to set the stage to a much larger degree to meet the customer beyond halfway, a customer that can watch their series in perfection, one card that can last a lifetime. I reckon that players will have larger settings, they have the space, open up any blue-ray or 4K player, most of it is space and adding a CF, or SD card reader (optionally both) is the easiest thing to do. Not walking back and forth to the player getting the next disc, merely one card and all seasons are there. Yes, newer series will likely go per season, but at present there are hundreds of series all well above a dozen discs, and the fans have needs, they want that card on their mobile, on the road and the card can take a lot more than any disc could, so what stopped a player like Sony? Another ‘too incompatible’ mention, or the fear of piracy? Piracy is already there, the disc allows for newer protection and even in store upgrades. Go to any store where you buy movies or TV-series, now consider a box (like GoT) and that box will be able to contain a dozen of your favourite series, now consider the space it is taking up and consider that one card could have all seasons and you keep it in your placer at all time, to be able to play it at your hearts content. So why is that solution not here now? Consider all the telecom players trying to be clever with their 5G, all whilst it is just not ready and do you really want your bandwidth to depend on your 5G router? Consider that IT Pro gave us a week ago “as they promote Kubernetes as the secret ingredient for closing the gap between 5G’s promises and 5G problems. Kubernetes does indeed have some potential to make 5G actually work well. That said, it’s not necessarily the holy grail of edge computing and telco networking that it is sometimes made out to be” (at https://www.itprotoday.com/hybrid-cloud/can-kubernetes-solve-5g-problems-partly-not-soon), there we are told “They make promises like “5G networks will one day offer peak data rates of up to 10 Gbps” and “5G’s hyper-fast speeds will revolutionise the way we live.” If you read statements like those carefully, you’ll notice that they’re predicated on theoretical future developments, not what 5G is actually delivering to the typical user today. That’s because, to date, 5G network implementations haven’t been all that impressive. They turn out to be slower than 4G in many cases, not to mention less reliable. 5G, in other words, has become “a bad joke.”” A setting I have been mentioning for close to two years and the joke gets to be worse, at present Saudi Arabia has a 5G network that is well over 700% faster than anything the US can offer, their BS marketing drive is that bad and it will get worse, as such do we want to rely on congestion, or do we want an option where we can watch what we love unhindered, optionally in a better setting than now? So whilst we take notice of “it won’t address all 5G problems, and it will take a long time–several years, most likely–before Kubernetes is a full-fledged 5G solution”, which I predicted a few times in the last two years, I made no mention of Kubernetes, I merely observed the greed driven stupidity of some and watch these ships wreck left right and center. So whilst American politicians are blaming China for their own lack of innovation, I created the setting of a 7th device that can push innovation and change. And when we consider that innovation drives creativity, I wonder what someone else can come up with tomorrow, I already set the design of a new device for IOS and Android, that is how I roll. All whilst Microsoft is pushing Forza on your mobile, I came up with two new pieces of hardware, yup, I feel decently good, especially as we see Microsoft falter again and again and now it get to pull the wool over the eyes of Apple and Sony too (life can be satisfying). Did I figure out everything? No, I did not, but if I had done so I would make life for 1,000 researchers at Microsoft impossible and that is not fair either, oh wait, I really do not care about that, sorry!

All this in a day, so what is stoping these moguls of achieving true innovation? #JustAsking

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March 9, 2021 · 00:24

Egg timer anyone?

It was a mere 12 hours ago when I gave the previous story, where the AP gave us “Attackers are finding it harder and harder to gain access via traditional methods, as vendors like Microsoft and Apple have hardened the security of the operating systems considerably over the last years”, yet less then an hour ago we see the BBC give us ‘European Banking Authority hit by Microsoft Exchange hack’, I am guessing that the AP was looking out for the needs of Microsoft, the timeline is too weird. Even as we see “The EU body said personal data may have been accessed from its servers. And it had pulled its entire email system offline while it assessed the damage. “The EBA is working to identify what, if any, data was accessed,” it said”, I wonder what and for how long was in the mix. You see, we might look at ““Everyone running these servers – government, private sector, academia – needs to act now to patch them,” White House press secretary Jan Psaki said. Microsoft believes a Chinese state-sponsored attacker called Hafnium is behind the hack.” No matter what or who Hafnium is, no one is looking towards Microsoft, no one is looking how the weakness was there in the first place. And if we accept ‘Microsoft believes a Chinese state-sponsored attacker called Hafnium is behind the hack’, the setting of time changes, it takes time to ascertain who did this, that is logical. Yet 12 hours after the AP story? This is direction, this is intent, the coincidences are too weird and I never give credence to coincidence. It is another setting of filtered information. First the Washington Post, then several others and now Associated Press, the stage is changing and some players are speculatively raking it in before it all implodes on itself. 

Yes, I admit and I agree that this is very ‘conspiracy theory’ yet consider the timeline, it is the one true linear path they cannot change, the directors can merely arrange their story according to the timeline, that is as good as they can make it. So when we look at the tweet from the NSC, we see “Patching and mitigation is not remediation if the servers have already been compromised”, yet there is a lack of investigation how for so long servers could be compromised, when one patch creates a new problem it is not a patch, but service level agreements and marketing need to report a patch and the problem remains, or optionally gets to be worse. Can we also optionally agree that if the Microsoft engineers can be circumvented Microsoft has a much larger problem and that is where you want to keep your data? When we see patch after patch, but no real solution, where can you put your faith?

The BBC article gives a nice list (at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56321567) on ‘Who has been attacked?’, yet the larger question on why Microsoft are leaking as a sieve is not dealt with, and even as we would like to guess, the fact is that there are too many patches, the setting is slowly becoming that Microsoft products are too unsecured to be considered for corporate needs and a shift to Unix/Linux might be essential to consider over time. Feel free to do it after you lost all your IP, but that is up to you. And in al this, how long has this be known? I cannot counter the accusations of that person named Hafnium, but it does imply that the situation was out there for a lot longer than we can be comfortable with. I leave that thought up to you.

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March 8, 2021 · 12:00

The wide net

We all have the idea to go phishing, we want trout, we want salmon and we use the biggest net possible to get at least one. So when AP gave us ‘Casting a wide intrusion net: Dozens burned with single hack’ (at https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-politics-europe-eastern-europe-new-zealand-f318ba1ffc971eb17371456b015206a5), not only was I not surprised, I had been warning people about this for a few years, that setting is apparently upon us now (or at least some are admitting it now). There we see “Nimble, highly skilled criminal hackers believed to operate out of Eastern Europe hacked dozens of companies and government agencies on at least four continents by breaking into a single product they all used” this does not surprise me, this happened in the late 80’s as well when someone used Aston Tate’s DB3 to introduce a virus, it is simple find something they all use and hamper its function, a basic strategy that an Italian (Julius Caesar) introduced 2000 years ago, there he hampered the roads and not servers but you get the idea, the classics still work.

When we are given “The Accellion casualties have kept piling up, meanwhile, with many being extorted by the Russian-speaking Clop cybercriminal gang, which threat researchers believe may have bought pilfered data from the hackers. Their threat: Pay up or we leak your sensitive data online, be it proprietary documents from Canadian aircraft maker Bombardier or lawyer-client communications from Jones Day.” It might seem rash but the people relied on others to keep their data safe and whilst we see more and more that they cannot contain the bacon the clients are suffering, this is not a simple station and we get it, but package solutions tend to come with flaws and that has been a truth for 20 years, so why are you all crying now? It is the final part that has more bearing “Members of Congress are already dismayed by the supply-chain hack of the Texas network management software company SolarWinds that allowed suspected Russian state-backed hackers to tiptoe unnoticed — apparently intent solely on intelligence-gathering — for more than half a year through the networks of at least nine government agencies and more than 100 companies and think tanks. Only in December was the SolarWinds hacking campaign discovered by the cybersecurity firm FireEye. France suffered a similar hack, blamed by its cybersecurity agency on Russian military operatives, that also gamed the supply chain. They slipped malware into an update of network management software from a firm called Centreon, letting them quietly root around victim networks from 2017 to 2020.” This is important because of what happened in the last two years, remember how ‘stupid’ American people started to blame Huawei for all the bad whilst offering absolutely no supporting evidence? Huawei does not need to bother to aid whichever government there was, silly software developers are doing that for them, we see an abundance of intrusion problems that include SolarWinds, Accellion and Cisco. A stage where thousands of systems are at risk, but no, the ‘silly’ people kept on blaming Huawei. Even I knew better and as Sony gave me the idea for an intrusion method called ‘Plus One’ (a viable way to drive the Pentagon nuts) with an alternative direction that I call ‘Vee One’, but that one has a few hiccups I reckon. Then I got creative and saw a new parameter in play. One that is based on a little part I read in a Cisco manual, the text “When You Add A Hard Disk To A Virtual Machine(VM), you can create a new virtual disk, add an existing virtual disk, or add a mapped Storage Area Network (SAN) Logical UnitNumber (LUN). In most cases, you can accept the default device node. For a hard-disk, a non default device node is useful to control the boot order or have different Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) controller types. For example, you might want to boot from an LSI Logic controller and use a Bus-logic Controller With bus sharing turned onto share a data disk with another VM.” You see that small text indicates that there is a nice workaround in Cisco CMX and it opens up a lot more than they bargained for, that in conjunction with the share issues thy were already facing gives out a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘Copy me I want to travel’, n’est pas? (for the French victims)

It is a much larger stage, most laws aren’t ready for this, prosecuting the guilty parties is close to impossible and any quick fix they make will only make things harder, the setting was and has for always been the makers of software, time constraints and lack of deep testing makes for a lousy solution and in most cases these players have a pushy marketing department (example: Ubisoft), and yes ‘You be soft!’ because the small tidbit that AP gives us with “Attackers are finding it harder and harder to gain access via traditional methods, as vendors like Microsoft and Apple have hardened the security of the operating systems considerably over the last years” yet it is a small stage and not a correct one. Weaknesses in Azure, issues with advertising in apps and a larger stage of programming, we see it clearest in .NET, but it goes way beyond that, for example “The problem of memory leaks is not uncommon in any technology. Simply put, the framework doesn’t release the memory that it no longer needs. .NET is frequently criticised for memory leaks and memory-related issues. Although .NET has a garbage collector for this sort of problem, engineers still have to invest additional efforts into proper resource management. And the leaks keep on growing as the application scales.” (source: Altexsoft) and it shows the smallest part, if there is a leak in one place, there will be in other places too and the leaks are not the real problem, getting it to semi-crash and taking over its right on a network are a quick way into any system, I saw the example with an accounting program (censored name), I got the program to crash (took about 20 seconds) and I ended up with the administrator rights to the entire mainframe from ANY location running that software. I get it, there will always be a bug in any place and the makers were quick to fix it, but for a few weeks there was an entrance point that took minimum efforts and that setting is only increasing with routers and cloud systems, these companies rely on marketeers that are ready to push for the investors sake and leave the client swimming in a swamp, I have seen it more than once and it will happen again, and this setting has been going on since 1989 and over the next 3-4 years it will grow to 150%, the push to billions and to quickly get to billions will be overwhelming for too many players all whilst the law will not be able to protect the victims, they will merely point at torts law, even though that you are the victim, most contracts are offered as an ‘as is’ solution and for the most software makers can avoid prosecution for the longest time, long enough for the hackers to get away with your data and sell it, what a lovely system you bought. Oh and before I forget, organised crime is way ahead of me, so for some it will already be too late.

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March 7, 2021 · 02:00

Science in art, deception through science

Just as I got past the first female night-horse (read: nightmare) I got into another one. I am not sure why, but for some reason it matters, in this there is a CIA wet work operative played by Graham McTavish, there is a spotter with him, he minds the listening system. They are watching a man seemingly talking to himself, but it is too much of a one sided conversation, the sniper (McTavish) changes the scope to thermal, now he sees a shimmer, one he had seen before, it was digital cloaking. He signals the spotter, who starts changing the dials on a small box and after several seconds he nods, he listens. He says ‘the other person is whispering Greek’, and he listens, they are looking at an almost surreal setting, it is almost 30 seconds until the spotter states ‘I cannot be here’ McTavish looks around, the man is absolutely pale with fear “I cannot be here” he states again, puts his sidearms in his mouth and pulls the trigger. The sniper gets out fast, they were both using suppressors, as such there was too little sound to set the alarm off. He grabs all the gear and he gets out as quickly a possible, all whilst sending the alert signal.

The scene was weird, I do not remember seeing it on TV or in the movies, but it got me thinking on communication, and soon thereafter encryption, do not ask why, I have no idea, but the slithers of one, connected to the idea of another. To show this here is an image

As you can see, it is in foundation a sudoku setting, an 81 figure number (nine times nine), yet the stage is to some degree predictable, every number used once, per square and no number the same in a row or column, even as there are only nine combinations, there is a larger stage for encryption systems to work on, but what if we look at killer sudoku?

As you see in the image, the stage becomes a little different, we get a combination of puzzles and it is that combination that could give reality to a new encryption method. A stage where the sudoku itself is merely part of the puzzle, it is the other part that gets us the encryption. Is it a 2H box, a 2V box and so on, but in that stage it becomes a lot harder to figure out the numbers. The shapes can be anything, a letter, numbers, any combination. The numbers are numbers but there are ways to encrypting that too, and as every level is larger the computer undoing the cypher will take more and more time, all whilst there is an optional setting to reset that setting, a solution in apps that makes any high end encrypted system a much larger option for diplomatic staff to keep encrypted data with them, without them knowing what they are carrying, or anyone for that matter. If they are not part of it, they are merely the vessel that the channel carries.

Or in humorous terms (an ode to Danny Kaye) “The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true!”, as such the issue is not the servant, that person has no idea what they are carrying, a new stage where 2-3 apps set a larger stage and with the security out of the way (thanks to Microsoft and Epic) anyone can be a courier. Yes, when you (optionally) saw ‘Microsoft sides with Epic in its fight with Apple, promises a more open MS Store’ with the text “Microsoft filed a declaration in support of Epic’s request for an injunction against Apple’s plan to remove its access to iOS development tools. The company said in the filing that the Unreal Engine is “critical technology for numerous game creators,” and that taking away Epic’s ability to support it on iOS and MacOS devices “will harm game creators and gamers.”” Most people do not see the larger picture, all this was merely a way for Epic to shun its duties, duties that allow smaller players to avoid larger costs, yet once greed sets in there is a larger stage and they paved the way for organised crime to take much larger steps for people to be tempted to quick cash only to learn at a much larger stage that they became mules. It is that stage that also allows for a new encryption systems, with people having 1-2 apps, that the person with the third app will be able to capture what they need, sometimes it will be with the persons consent, but not always, and that is where we are at. The rich taking what they want and not wanting to be held responsible, no matter what damage they are at the head of, what a world we live in, it seems that my nightmares are a much more pleasant place to be soon enough.

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February 25, 2021 · 11:45

A repetition of events

This is speculative, this is my view on the matter and it might be very very wrong, yet I see events take place and I have seen it all before, this is not a first. It has happened and it will happen again yet to be true I never expected Apple to be part of that equation. No matter how we consider the stage, no matter how we thing it will be alright. As I personally see it, it will not.

My insight started well over 30 years ago with a Dutch Company called ‘Infotheek’, an IT company when IT was a mere myth, it was rising and in that air it started to believe its own marketing. I saw some service person air anecdote after anecdote but never really managing anything, merely pushing the expectations of its boss unto the staff member on his watch and anyone not meeting presented and assumed expectations, that person was done away. They started buying companies and keeping the few stars that a company had and the rest, you guessed it, over time they were done away. It was slow enough not to raise flags, but the centre core was that they were purchasing revenue. I saw a pretty amazing sales star walking away from that. Even if I never realised it at the time, his name was Oscar, he had a sales routine and a calculator and he was doing tricks with the calculator and he was good, he really was. I never understood him, all I saw was some slick suited person with expensive sunglasses, but I was in services and happy to be there giving technical support. It was the golden age of Tulip Computers and I was aiding those users. Yet I saw Infotheek buying company after company, I saw people go faster and faster and it was my first view on ‘buying revenue’ but there were more later, when it became more common ground. These thoughts went through my mind as I took notice of ‘Apple buys a company every three to four weeks’ (source: BBC). The stage is similar, the problem is what path are they taking? Are they buying revenue “Apple recently delivered its largest quarter by revenue of all time, bringing in $111.4bn (£78.7bn) in the first-quarter of its fiscal year 2021”? Or perhaps it is a stage here they are accumulating cost to lower tax brackets? Are they merely looking for a cheap way to get the real jewels in a company, get the revenue and do away the rest? In this we need to consider the number one part, they are not doing anything illegal, yet the stage remains that the bought companies have a population of X, when within 2 years the population goes to X-45%, and when you see that this involves 100 companies, how many people will become unemployed? Even if we see “Most often, Apple buys smaller technology firms and then incorporates their innovations into its own products” we see a half truth, it is not the whole story. Yes, we accept that sometimes it is straight revenue like “Apple’s largest acquisition in the last decade was its $3bn purchase of Beats Electronics, the headphone maker founded by rapper and producer Dr Dre” and there is nothing wrong with that, but there is a larger risk that some people lose the foresight (or is that hindsight) that the Apple egg becomes like an actual egg, a hard outer exterior, but behind that it is space, empty space, not all of it is the joke (sorry read yoke) of the matter. A larger stage and in this case not some presented larger Dutch IT firm, but an actual behemoth that I set somewhere between $1,000,000,000 and $1,500,000,000 when that comes crashing down what will the impact be? And any firm that I in the stage of buying revenue is always heading for disaster and when it becomes someone buying another firm almost every month for 6 years that crash is close to a given.

You see, on paper it all looks nice, but incorporating new companies, re-schooling staff, educating staff on a new set of ideologies is a much larger task and the stage is alway in motion, the stage of confirming and checking whether the new people are on track of becoming images of the old people is a setting that takes time and when you buy a company every month the pyramid becomes unstable a lot faster than anyone realises and when that happens, good luck with finding support and services to your Apple product. In this there is one given, the sales people tend to forget about the services required and when they learn that their sales pipeline is stuffed because they forgot to give trust the larger stage of corporate valour it all goes pear shape rather fast.

In this I am speculating on the past, perhaps Apple will be fine. Perhaps I am all wrong and my experience does not count. So basically I could be wrong, however GeekWire gives us ‘Chromebooks outsold Macs worldwide in 2020, cutting into Windows market share’ (at https://www.geekwire.com/2021/chromebooks-outsold-macs-worldwide-2020-cutting-windows-market-share/) a week ago. This does not mean that I am suddenly right. A 6 year tactic is not the stage that is seen in one article over one year that is optionally the weirdest year of the century. 

One does not imply the other but we need to take notice of both, especially in a stage where the 5G future is more and more likely to be a cloud based one and we cannot deny that the Chromebook is a pure cloud based solution. It is up to us all but when we consider that we need to realise that we too are wage slaves and service slaves and whatever hinders or threatens us will threaten all, a small truth that goes back to the age of Gaius Julius Caesar and for those who remember his name from the history books as a politician and a ruler, he was a general first, so he knows a few things, come to think of it, he set in motion some of the tactics that are till used 2 millennia later, all set before he became Dictator Perpetuo, think of that before we dismiss all of the facts and in this there are more facts, some are hidden in the story, it will be your puzzle of the day. In this I give you one small clue ‘Is Iteration in similarity the same as iteration and does that warrant consideration of the title iteration?’

Have a great day!

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February 23, 2021 · 22:12

The stage moves on

Yes, today I got the news I was happy about. There was of course the news on Diablo IV coming. But the one bit of news I did not know about hit me about 56.3 minutes ago (roughly). Diablo 2 will be coming to us in a remastered version, as such is there something like too much Diablo? And even as it makes me happy, it shows that some are in a larger stage to resurrect the great old games in a new jacket. I have been stating this for almost a year, and now as Diablo 2, Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3 are coming, the good old days of gaming is coming back. There are always reservations, in the stage where we live Mass Effect for years, we will be faced with a game where we go through the motions, yet there are hundred of thousand of gamers who missed out on that and for them I am happy. This stage is not the same for Diablo 2, yes the story is clear but the game was a lot more than the story and that will still satisfy. Even as some wasted time on a relaunch of Bullfrog games, the good games could still be coming. There is Nightdive Studios who is working on System Shock and there are a few others that will bring good gaming back to systems and consoles. It is all the stage and with the $138 billion projected for gaming this year alone. Everyone wants a slice of that pie and some will not care how they get it. 

Even as we all applaud the effort and the choices, we are still in a holding pattern on the games that will redefine gaming on the next generation of consoles. Some are hoping that Ratchet and Clank will bring it this June, most are eagerly awaiting Horizon Forbidden West to bring the goods.  Others are expecting that God of war, who redefined what the PS4 could achieve will see a similar setting when God of War: Ragnarok hits the PS5. A few (like me) hope that Gotham Knights will bring the cheese to the mouse, we are all victims of our own needs and Batman is my obsession, it has been since I was a little fellow staring at Adam West and Burt Ward, it took a while for my mind to grasp special effects, but that was life in innocence, or as some members of the Dark Brotherhood would state ‘it’s life’s greatest illusion’, we can offer no choice, the door was right. And as we accept that illusion we look towards the games that are still to come. 

I am not going to add links to all these great teasers, trailers and spoilers, because in my mind they tend to be all spoilers. Whenever it is a video that does not come from the actual makers, I tend to avoid it, merely for the dangers of seeing or hearing too much. Just like someone stating that in God of War: Ragnarok you will have to find armour 42 made by the smith Anthonius Stark (don’t worry, I made that up myself right now), we all have our ideas on teasers and real parts, even as I hope that Bethesda will add two achievements to their new Elder Scrolls game it will not be a teaser or spoiler towards the actual game. The first one is ‘You stole someone’s sweat-roll’ the other one is ‘He took an arrow to his knee’, those who played Skyrim will know what that is about and optionally giggle for a moment. 

There are dozens of examples and most gamers have their own thoughts on the passing of time whilst gaming. For me it is creation, it is what made me design The Elder Scrolls VII: Restoration (was 6, now 7). I did this in 2013, almost a year after finishing the game on Xbox 360 and PS3. We all have our ways of dealing with time and it seems that stories and creation are mine. So as I look and re-evaluate the stage of almost 5 seasons of Keno Diastima, I need to consider if 5 seasons are optional 3 seasons, a season with more bang for the buck, that is of-course one path. I am still considering on rewriting ‘How to assassinate a politician’, we all need hobbies, don’t we?

It also keeps my mind of my 5G IP, which is now in a wait state, a setting that is not good for the nerves, let me tell you, as such recreating the works I do have is not the worst way to pass the time. Some might consider that the stage is moving on, I merely consider that the stage was never standing still and you either keep up or you are part of those left behind, no matter whether the stage is one you devised yourself or one that others placed in front of you. As such some will point at DARPA with their disruptioneering division. I say hire a politician, they are experts in “have the potential to disrupt current understanding and/or approaches”, their input have had drastic influence in the stage for both the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II as well as the USS Zumwalt, and I say (oversimplifying the problem whenever I can) disruptioneering achieved.

The stage moves on, but it is us that defines the stage, not others, others only define the stage when they invite us to it and we are willing to be the tool (read: participant) of the stage we want to be on for either money, fame, continuity or passing the time.

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February 23, 2021 · 01:01

It’s good to be evil

It is the the phase that gave life and fame to Dungeon Keeper 2, it was not used by the first game that was released in 1997, but the fame of the first game was not less, it was a time when games were still in its infancy and good ideas were wasted all over the place. Both the first and second dungeon keeper were amazing games, as was an earlier release by Bullfrog named Magic Carpet. Still the IP was used later on by EA to set Dungeon Keeper in a stage of micro transactions and there EA screwed up the IP for life. A stage set to ‘maximise’ earnings became the downfall of EA. Yet the original games are still revered by a lot of people, as such wouldn’t it be nice if EA cleaned up its act? In the last week we got ‘EA now owns Codemasters and its many, many racing games’, ‘Here’s why Glu is an excellent strategic fit for EA’, as well as ‘The Silence After EA’s Anthem 2.0 Decision is Concerning’, you see Glu could be a good buy, yet in all this it only sets out the stage if there is an option to get a return on investment towards the $2,100,000,000 spend on this. The investigation (at https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-02-22-heres-why-glu-is-an-excellent-strategic-fit-for-ea) is quite good. It shows a part that I never considered and that does not matter, yet what is important is “The acquisition helps EA address a weakness by acquiring a suite of high-grossing titles that are very female-friendly and have large, loyal audiences. Plus, Glu’s expertise with these genres means that EA is gaining a lot more knowledge and insight into this demographic, which we expect will translate into enhancements for future Sims games.” It is important, because we see an element that is mostly ignored “have large, loyal audiences” is nice, but only if you treat them right and that is where EA loses the wheels on their wagons, not once, but multiple times. As I see it greed driven executives tend to destroy signs of loyalty. And there the shoe becomes a larger stage of concern. You see we can accept that we can either do right by loyalty or create it, the first tends to be easy, muzzle the greed driven executive is a first, creating it requires the greed driven executive to leave the room permanently and EA does not seem to be able to do this. 

In this, there are a few options, consider the stage we saw when we were offered Magic Carpet. So what happens when that game is relaunched in an upgraded version, one that would play wildly on a Nintendo Switch. Elements of the game can remain in place but the game needs alteration as to not infringe on the IP of Bullfrog (now EA), I feel justified as EA ignored it old IP for well over a decade and the ones they did not ignore was clobbered towards the stone age. 

As such Magic Carpet could be a much larger sandbox game. A map of Iraq extending to the Mediterranean Sea, with parts of Saudi Arabia and Iran. A stage where the power of your castle and the magic carpet comes from growth, a stage where we can learn new tricks and new abilities are found all over the map. You see the old systems could never do this, the computers were not powerful enough, but the Switch might make a new setting true, its controllers will have one for movement, one for fighting. A stage grown to the new systems. As such we can grow the fortress, and as abilities are acquired we can do more, go further and unlock more. As such the game takes a rather new turn.

The same can be done with Dungeon keeper, but that will have to take a massive adjustment, the stage of Dungeon keeper is too set. Still the idea was awesome. Consider the stage of Silent Hill, but now you are not the player, you are pyramid head, a stage where we consider the games were you play the antagonist. Pyramid Head is one of the more famous ones, yet consider that station with the man Dirk Garthwaite who became wrecker (a Marvel character), what if we can reshape such a person to our personal taste? We are all getting overwhelmed with the Norse gods through TV series and games, yet that same setting might come from Greek, Egyptian, Hindu, Inca or Aztec deities. All options to consider in the stage of making a game, yet how many still embrace the good old slogan ‘It’s good to be evil’?

I am asking because some sources give us ‘Global game revenue to reach $29bn by 2021’, all whilst a country like Australia only set their notch on $140 million, which amounts to 0.4%, not a lot to write home about is it? If loyalty is indeed key and when we see EA (and a few others) bungle the cake, how come they still end up with a large slice of that pie? As I see it, it should be relatively easy to take it from them with a better product and a better product is key in gaining loyalty. EA might have paid $2.1 billion for that database, but that will not stop competitors Nintendo and optionally Amazon to take over that cake. These two players are driven to loyalty and they can have it if they play their cards right. 

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February 20, 2021 · 20:53

Contemplation and consideration

This is not part 4, but it is linked to yesterday’s article. As I was contemplating a few things, more precisely looking at 5G parameters, I started considering a new media format. You see YouTube became great by being better at compressed video viewing, over time the became the one and nearly only expert. Yet 5G offers a lot more and it offers a new stage, a stage where the advertisement will be completely downloaded in a second, so what happens with the rest of the time? What happens when the video offers a click to a brochure, a leaflet, the website and other matters? You see information is given, but in 5G the offered information can be a lot more and as I see it there is not too much manoeuvring in that area. A stage where some might go for ‘Yes, we are working on it’, yet I am now offering the idea in the open, as such it becomes public domain. In this I believe there is a lot more directions opening, as soon as the bandwidth becomes available we will see an explosion of ideas and they are all directed towards gaining the attention of an audience, a situation we might call ‘the choice of a new congregation’. There is no real insight whether it will be an option for good or for bad. In the 50’s advertisements were seen as a power of good, a power of information giving. In the last 10 years it became a power towards harassment. This does not mean that we should stop the direction, but perhaps when we hand the power back to the consumer we can revert to a better stage, one that is information bringing.

Consider the image of the book (one I am eagerly awaiting), what happens when we click on it that it will take us directly to OUR local bookshop, or our PERSONAL choice in online place? 5G makes this possible and a lot more. Yet the centralised data hoarders want you to go a THEIR specific place, it is time for that to change. I wonder if Amazon or Google will champion such a solution? It becomes a lot more demanding when it is a trailer, or a car advertisement, yet 5G will enable larger solutions whilst still ending up being faster than before.

I created my 5G IP to set aside centralisation, a place like Neom City requires this and they are only the beginning. The EU has a direct need and even as they still have nationalised central points, that too will become a thing of the past, the larger data centres will not care where its origin was, it merely crunches and as I was considering the stages that will unfold, I created the second 5G IP. The third was part of that but it was a longer trail, so I made it public domain, and in this we now have an optional part 4, a side I only considered and contemplated tonight, actually I was watching Downton Abbey when this happened. Something clicked and I reckon part 5 is not far away, all whilst those claiming to be on top are not producing anything. I (on the other hand) created the setup for two movies, a TV series and half a dozen games. The autumn of my life is quite the creationary delight. 

Who would have thunk it?

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February 16, 2021 · 17:29

Doubt and consideration

Yes, we all have them, doubts that is. And I had mine yesterday and this morning. I got a whiff of a game called Sandship (on iOS) and it did not take me long to get hooked. Now, we all get hooked, but hooked can be short term and long term. This game has all the trimmings that we can expect to see. It has some sort of storyline, it has puzzles, a sort of challenge setting and of course there is always the option of micro transactions. All these games have them now, but in this game it is done in both an ingenious and non-invasive way. As I was looking at what is possible, I realised that there was doubt in me. You see, I feel certain that a game like this would be a huge success on the Nintendo Switch, it would need some tweaking, but the foundation of the game is close to perfect. And as far as I can tell, Nintendo has nothing like this in their arsenal, especially when you consider that there is some level of operational education in the game. I get it, some will doubt my view on this, yet I also find myself wondering whether the makers took a look towards the Console, or are they in a stage where they will rely on micro transactions? For a beginning developer it is a fair call to rely on the micro transactions, yet this is not a game made by a beginner, if so that person is a real gaming savant. 

The doubt is whether I am seeing it correctly, I am to some degree anti-MT, yet I understand that these MT’s are a good starting point for any developer. In addition, even as I accept that some people want to play on their phones, some games need a tablet or a decent TV screen. It just works better that way.

The consideration is for some of these developers, once they have a starting capital, did they consider setting the game, optionally adjusted on a console and with cloud gaming on the rise that consideration will soon be a lot more important than ever before. It is more important because extending existing IP is a lot more important and optionally a lot cheaper than making up new IP. 

This gets me to part 3 in this, you see there was a game in 1985, it was made by Epyx and it was called Chipwits, now the game seems redundant, but the educational side as well as the challenge in all this was amazing, especially for a computer with only 64KB (RAM and ROM), consider what could be done with a Nintendo Switch that has 62,500 times the memory and a CPU that is probably just as excessively more powerful than the 6502 in the CBM-64 was. One of many games that are as easily remembered as some of the other games that some gamers idolised. Why? Because these games were truly innovative and original. And even now as as we see some developers concentrate on the flash and the bang, they are all seemingly forgetting that gamers come in all shapes and sizes, in addition, plenty of younger gamers are dependant on the parents and guess what, these parents are not a great fan of games like Manhunter 2, but they are  always seemingly willing to buy the additional game that has an educational character. But that might be mere speculation.

What is in view is that too many games rely on one path, whilst they could add paths to their software range and in these days having more than one path is important, especially when the waning range of downloadable games that can be surpassed every new week, yet the games we purchase are the games we keep around, often for a long time. There are plenty of examples. 

It is that part that shows the folly of Google when they dropped certain paths from their Stadia range, I wonder what Amazon will do, because we have 4 generations of consoles that show us that original and exclusive games make the console. PSX, N64, PS2, PS3, Xbox, Xbox360, PS4 and PS5. They all had their range and gathered clusters of 1000’s if not hundreds of thousands. Microsoft had their Master Sergeant, Sony had Lara, Kratos (and a few others), it is the exclusives that makes and break the console, yet original games are still part of that equation and the makers need to realise that, because there is every indication that some are relying on makers like Ubisoft and EA (complete with bugs), yet that comes with a risk, the moment the gamer has had enough the entire development house will be regarded as toxic, whether that is fair or not, the gamer will almost always act out of emotion and emotion does not really consider the balance of the topic, merely his bruised ego and the aggravation of glitches. As such all consoles need a stack of options, options that Google (as I was told) has done away with, giving a larger playing field to Amazon. It is in this light that we will optionally sooner than expected see:

1. Sony
2. Nintendo 
3. Microsoft

Turn into 

1. Sony
2. Nintendo
3. Amazon
4. Microsoft
4. Google

This is not a typo, Even if Amazon wins, there is no real telling how Microsoft ends up against Google Stadia, I think that is the fear that drove their Xcloud. You remember the pictures? 

Why keep on pushing this when you have a console that comes close to the PS5? No one is asking that question. We see speculative settings on Xcloud and mobiles, yet the real gamer does not consider a mobile screen to be a real screen. So facilitating to more games will push Microsoft further to the back of the console line. I wonder how much Amazon and Google are considering that path, and there are options, there are games that matter, but will the hardware people consider the options that are decently in abundance?

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February 14, 2021 · 21:54

Between the lines

Yup it happens, it happens to most of us. It seems I got a little bit too clever for a lot of people. In the first there were the accusations of me being too violent, all those poor hackers that I was willing to put to death. Well, that is debatable but what was between the lines was ignored by way too many people. 

I stated in yesterday’s blog “Hades assures me it is a door of change and opportunity”, that was the trigger. You see, the article is about escalations. As Trump is acquitted a foundation of change is almost guaranteed. I state that through “that also opens the door of opportunity”, as Americans allowed for acquittal of the events that happened and fuelled an attack on the US Capitol building, others will now see it as an opportunity to allow for more and optionally equal extreme events. There is not an ‘if’ it will happen, it will son enough become a ‘where and when’ setting. A station of escalation and denial. As USA Today gave us 2 weeks ago “Capitol riot inquiry grows to 400 suspects; feds expect to bring sedition charges ‘very soon’”, do you actually think and believe that pushing that NYC realtor out of the door at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, D.C. 20500 U.S. will stop all this? Some of these people have created a platform and they like the limelight. In all this the extremists are merely the tip of the iceberg, now that others are seeing that they can get away with things, more will happen, the US will face more and more of these issues until something drastic is done and there is every indication that their opponents (Russia and China) will see this as an opportunity too, Russia first and the anti-China rhetoric that Donald Trump pushed will keep them pushing for a several indiscrete humiliating situations. I have no idea how this will be done, but if they can kill economic options for America, they will. This stands lose from the Chengdu deal that I hope to facilitate in certain places, the US decided not to deliver, and there are other 5G opportunities all over Europe, now that Huawei is making massive waves in Saudi Arabia and showing how much faster they are than the US (well over 700% faster), some European players are catching on. It is (for some) nice to see ‘Bumble: Female-founded dating app tops $13bn in market debut’ (source BBC), yet when these developers see that they are running on a mere 14% of what is possible, what do you think will happen when other avenues open up for these developers? I saw those changes coming 2 years ago. So what do you think will happen when these developers are in a state where they are either limited by technology or in a place where they have the start of a larger platform? At present Chinese developers have that much of a lead upcoming and the sooner some players realise that they are no longer part of the equation, the sooner they will consider that it is not now, nor ever part of their wallet, when the developers figure things out, the field changes and Europe can only hope that they can facilitate fast enough, before other players (consider India) become the larger player, and that is no idle boast, there is at present a larger concern that Huawei will get both Pakistan and India, when they do China will have optional starts in other areas as well. 

A change of staged players will happen, it will happen when those who need their version of a gravy train are in the largest need for it to continue, optionally delaying change, and there the issue becomes a much larger concern, the Trumpism players will see it as an optional platform to gain visibility, slowing everything down. A stage of Change and opportunity, delusional opportunity as some see it, but a stage that will delay too many players for too long and some people when they see their idea raising $13,000,000,000 they will not care where they are, they will go where their IP grows the fastest and the furthest. And every developer that moves will start the process of 3-8 developers making a similar move, a stage I predicted in 2018. Now that it is happening, playing politics is a dangerous stage, now that some actions are getting acquitted we will see repetitive business all over the field, even if they are unsuccessful they will try and slow too many parts that should not be slowing down, that is the nature of things.

It was all between the lines, I have been staying this in several articles all over the last 2 years in that stage the players better worry if the delayed stage will allow them to continue.

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